Child support changes could hit 25% of lone parents, warns charity

Changes to the way lone parents receive child support could see a quarter falling through the system, a charity warned on the day government reforms come into effect. From this week, separating couples on benefits - who make up 70% of child support claimants - will be encouraged to reach their own arrangements voluntarily, leaving the government's new Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission to concentrate on those cases where people repeatedly refuse to pay maintenance or regularly default.

Fiona Weir, chief executive of One Parent Families/Gingerbread, said the reforms could be "disastrous" and would hinder the government's aim of reducing by half the number of children in poverty by 2010, and eliminating it by 2020.

While supporting the move towards voluntary arrangements, she said the government was not doing enough to counter what could be high numbers of single parents who might not claim benefits within a voluntary system.

At the moment all single parents on benefit have to apply for maintenance through the Child Support Agency, but in the future they will be able to decide for themselves whether to continue to use the agency. The CSA will be phased out by 2011.

One Parent Families/Gingerbread says research by the National Centre for Social Research, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, shows that 24% of lone parents within a voluntary system may go without child maintenance altogether. Weir said: "The new agency faces immense challenges. Today only one in three eligible children get child maintenance. We need to build a culture that sees it as socially unacceptable not to support children after separation and to make sure that the most vulnerable do not lose out."

The Conservatives, who have supported the government's welfare reforms, backed the move to a voluntary system of payments. Andrew Selous, shadow child support minister, said: "Many parents want to be treated responsibly and not to be forced to use a state scheme when they would prefer to make their own arrangements. Voluntary agreements have worked well in Australia."

In January the architect of Australia's child maintenance system, Patrick Parkinson, visited the UK to warn that British plans for voluntary payments would mean children would get far less than they deserved from their absent parent. Though half of single parents in Australia arrange the transfer of money themselves, more than 90% of cases are still overseen by the child support agency.

Defending the changes, a spokesman for the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission said: "In future, all parents will have the same options for making a child maintenance arrangement that best suits their circumstances, whether this is a private arrangement or via the statutory maintenance service. Nobody is being encouraged to 'opt out' of the statutory service and it will remain available to all those who are unable to agree private maintenance arrangements."

Yesterday also marked the first day of the government's replacement of incapacity benefit with a new benefit, the employment and support allowance. New claimants will have to undergo an independent test to evaluate what work they can do.